The three treatises in On the Manipulation of Money and Credit were written in German between 1923 and 1931. Together they include some of Mises’s most important contributions to monetary and trade-cycle theories and constitute a precursor to Mises’s major work, Human Action.

On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation provides analysis of the allocation of money between capitalists, landowners, and agricultural workers in Britain. Through this analysis, Ricardo came to advocate free trade and oppose Britain’s restrictive “Corn laws.” Here are his classic commentaries on certain points of contention and divergence with the political economic writings of Adam Smith and T. R. Malthus.

The Organization of Inquiry, the third volume in Liberty Fund’s The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock, was originally published by Duke University Press in 1966. This is a treatise by one of the most stalwart practitioners of the scientific method in political economy—Gordon Tullock. Charles K. Rowley, Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason University, writes in his introduction to this book, “From a purely technical perspective, this book stands out as his [Tullock’s] best-written single authored work. The book sets out his own views on scientific method—views that he would faithfully reflect in all of his subsequent scholarship.”

The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution is perhaps one of the most important books written on the American Revolution by a European author. It is an original study of the subject by a conservative, objective German observer who acknowledges the legitimacy of the American Revolution, but also asserts at the same time that it was not a revolution but a legitimate transition.

In his two volumes on the Revolution, Bernhard Knollenberg provides a basic narrative of events with extensive citations to the sources and a thorough discussion of the historiography. He concentrates on the political and constitutional clash between Parliament and the colonies that led to the Revolution. Social, economic, and intellectual history enter the story where needed, but Knollenberg was essentially a political historian. Although steeped in the sources and scrupulous about the facts, he wrote Whig history. His sympathies lay with the Americans. He believed that the British ministries were responsible for the crumbling of the empire and that the Americans represented the cause of liberty.

The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks is one of the major products of the Scottish Enlightenment and a masterpiece of jurisprudence and social theory. Drawing on Adam Smith’s four-stages theory of history and the natural law’s traditional division of domestic duties into those toward servants, children, and women, Millar provides a rich historical analysis of the ways in which progressive economic change transforms the nature of authority.

The Pacificus-Helvidius Debates of 1793–1794 matched Hamilton and Madison in the first chapter of an enduring discussion about the proper roles of executive and legislative branches in the conduct of American foreign policy. Ignited by President Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation of 1793, which annulled the eleventh article of America’s treaty with France of 1778, the debate addressed whether Washington had the authority to declare America neutral, despite the early alliance treaty with France. The Liberty Fund edition brings together for the first time all the relevant original documents of this controversy.

This volume focuses on Ricardo’s shorter essays printed in the Morning Chronicle, which deal exclusively with his thoughts on the inflationary monetary policy of the Bank of England and Britain’s consequent Bullion Crises. In these essays, the genesis of Ricardo’s theory of “hard money” emerges as a tool to hedge against inflation using metallic currency. The Bullion Committee, created by the House of Commons in 1819, subsequently adopted his recommendations. His writings here gave rise to the currency school of hard money.